I agree, I didn't mean to change the way module maintainers make specific technical decisions for their modules. But many decisions are relevant for the whole community, and using such software would allow people to participate more easily and give them a feeling their voice counts.
Keeping track of the process would become much easier than the current mix of IRC, mailing lists and wiki pages. I sent a message to the gnome-love list too, hoping relevant teams will see it there. Since I don't even have any area of responsibility in the Gnome project, all I'm doing is to suggest the use of loomio. The decision is up to the people responsible for things here in the actual teams. I wanted to make sure you are aware of loomio. Olav mentioned something about involvement or marketing which I didn't understand, but just to make things clear: I have nothing to do with loomio or Gnome (except for being a user on Gnome 3 on my laptop), I'm just a random person who heard about loomio and suggests you to use it, if it fits the project's decision making model. Everything else is up to you, I can't speak to anyone in the name of the whole community. Enjoy :) On א', 2013-04-14 at 21:31 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: > > > > On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño <[email protected]> > wrote: > On Sun, 2013-04-14 at 20:53 -0400, Hashem Nasarat wrote: > > > [...] > > Sriram, while I agree many problems would be alleviated with > more > > volunteer time, I've witnessed multiple instances in the > past 6 months > > where decisions were not made democratically, despite a > clear lack of > > consensus. Most recently, there were a great deal of changes > to the > > gnome-shell "All Applications" view very late in the 3.8 > schedule, well > > after code freeze, and despite visible disagreement. Loomio > seems to > > offer an intuitive way of seeing how controversial a change > is. > > > "If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked > for a > better horse" -- Henry Ford [1] > > Software development is not a democracy. Decisions are taken > by people > who actually develop the software. Comments might or might > not be > welcomed depending of several factors (politeness, pertinence, > reputation, data, etc.). > > > Germán is right. In free software land, the module maintainer is the > ultimate dictator of what goes into the code base. So the decision > falls upon the maintainer and a trusted cohort or two. In which > case, decisions are fairly easy to come to and you don't really need > decision software. > > > Marketing and others non-coding teams tends to require more consensus > mostly because sometimes money and tangible resources are involved so > decisions are done jointly. That's where such things would be > interesting. > > > So for instance, your suggestion of decision software might quite well > for the Board when trying to document consensus, but it doesn't map > well to the technical culture of free software. > > > sri > > > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-devel-list mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
